[EASST-Eurograd] CfP: Infrastructures of Innovation and the Materialization of Futures – DASTS Conference 2026

[angela.agurto.z--- via Eurograd]

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to share this call for papers for our panel at the upcoming DASTS conference, to be held in Denmark in 2026.

Panel Title: Infrastructures of Innovation and the Materialization of Futures
Session Organisers: Dr. Cindy Rentrop & Angela Agurto, Technical University of Munich

Panel Description:
Innovation is not merely the outcome of entrepreneurial capacity or policy design; it is an effect of sociotechnical infrastructures through which futures are imagined, stabilized, and contested. This panel approaches innovation as a material accomplishment, produced through heterogeneous assemblages of policy instruments, digital platforms and identities, metrics, organizational forms, and everyday practices.

Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, the panel foregrounds innovation infrastructures as sites of boundary work, co-production, and interpretive flexibility. Rather than treating innovation systems as neutral, we examine how they actively configure who can appear as an innovator, what counts as innovation, which futures become materialized and for whom. Particular attention is paid to actors often framed as peripheral—SMEs, cooperatives, and so-called "hidden champions"—whose practices frequently sit at the margins of formal innovation regimes while nonetheless materially shaping socio-technical futures.

While some contributions may engage with Denmark as an empirical case, the panel is explicitly comparative and conceptual. It invites analyses that treat national or regional innovation systems not as containers, but as situated infrastructures embedded in translocal flows of capital, data, standards, and imaginaries.

Guiding Questions:
- How is innovation infrastructurally produced? How do funding schemes, programs, platforms, standards, and evaluation devices function as material actors that stabilize particular futures while marginalizing others?
- What kinds of innovation practices remain partially illegible to dominant systems? How do collectives and firms enact alternative innovation pathways through peer networks, cooperative forms, crowdfunding, or platform-mediated visibility?
- How do digital infrastructures reconfigure co-production? In what ways do digital traces, social media performances, and platform affordances become sites where innovation identities and futures are negotiated?
- How do innovation cultures travel, translate, or resist? What happens when innovation models circulate across regions and sectors, and how are they reworked in situated practices?

We welcome empirically grounded and conceptually driven papers that engage with STS approaches to innovation, including but not limited to:
- Ethnographic or digital methods
- Studies of SMEs, cooperatives, and informal and formal innovation networks
- Analyses of innovation policy as infrastructure
- Comparative or multi-sited perspectives

By shifting attention from innovation as an outcome to innovation as an infrastructural and material practice, this panel seeks to open up critical conversations about power, exclusion, and the uneven making of futures. It invites STS scholars to interrogate not only how innovation happens, but how innovation infrastructures make actors, shape identities, and authorize particular visions of the future.

If you are interested in contributing a paper, please send an abstract of up to 250 words to angela...@tum.de by March 17th, 2026.

We look forward to receiving your contributions and to building a thought-provoking panel together.

Best regards,

Angela Agurto
Research Assistant (Hiwi) | Innovation Society and Public Policy (ISPP)
MA Candidate, Science, Technology and Society (STS)
angela...@tum.de | She/Her
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